If After I Have Dreamt
by lyrically
Summary: Hallucinations give way for near tangibility. [DMC spoilers]


**Notes:** This was actually written a week before I finished _A Sonnet On the Sea_. Stylistically speaking, it's a little bit different but not by much. I was concerned about whether I should put an AU label on this because I took advantage of creative liberties in regards to the last scene with Jack and Elizabeth. In other words, it never happened in the movie but for this story to work, I _needed_ it to happen. So, if you ignore that tidbit, I think it'll be fine.

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**If After I Have Dreamt**

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Elizabeth stands beneath the August dawn on the shoreline of the sea, her feet damp and sticky from the misty blue sea-salt of the morn. The sun begins to ascend from the horizon, the last glimmer of stars fading away with the last quarter shadow of the moon. Upon random reflection, it had since only been forty-eight hours in which she and her beloved William Turner had exchanged quick wedding vows in the midst of churning, political chaos, flower petals strewn all around them. It had taken place weeks after Captain Jack Sparrow's disappearance into the mouth of the beast, giving way to proper reconciliations and reassurances between lovers, a promise of dear and genuine love, a soft and wistful emotion borne from romantic hearts.

In short of an hour, her husband will awaken and offer a sleepy smile of greeting to his newly-wedded bride, of which her presence is needed to occur. But she _needs_ this time to ponder the pirate's whereabouts. So, before that time in which she must make haste to his bedside, she spends all she has left on the sands, watching seabirds take flight and glide along the surface of the small, murmuring waves of the ocean. It was an impossibly vast body of hope, of absense, and of longing. And, perhaps, many more things.

The routine is the same: she wakes up before the sun, waits, and waits until she is wrought with nostalgia. In her lone time, Elizabeth Swann loves to contemplate things she cannot truly understand, especially of the incident that occurred on the _Black Pearl_.

On that fateful late afternoon weeks prior, before the ship and its lone inhabitant descended, she had kissed betrayal on his lips, sated his curiosity of her person, and shackled him to the post during which her fingers softly passed along his cloth-clad waist and unhooked the compass that she desired. Now, in retrospect, she thinks she may have borrowed -- as one with the spirit of a pirate would proclaim -- it as a subconscious reaction that, despite her misdeed and her belief that it was _him_ and not the ship, she could save him one day by knowing where her heart had set sail in the hands of a rogue.

She had ignored it, then, in the adventure to search for Davy Jones' beating, broken heart. She remembers the first time the compass dial shuddered and shifted in his direction, the way she lifted her eyes to the form of a confident, rum-obsessed, oft-swaggering man looking out into the distance for a treasure with a lazy sparkle in his eyes. It had been denial after that, especially on the island of white sand and green reeds, when, after a brief moment of uncertainty, the compass had pointed in his direction. Again. And yet, she avoided any plausible truth to it.

There was no chance an object could peer into an individual's soul and know desire. A compass wasn't alive to know such things.

Today, she touches its center and brings it close to her chest. She sits down on the sand, her eyes never leaving it, and cares naught for her soaked dress. The water is warm and comforting, blue liquid laces washing up against her legs. The touch feels the same as the breath on her face when he denied her first attempt at persuasion aboard the _Pearl_.

Elizabeth, now, cannot remember her true intentions on that day.

She closes her eyes and smiles to herself, unsure why, and falls to her back. The sky is brightening and the clouds are cotton-like -- softly textured, pillowy, and inviting. A light and warm sea breeze weaves through her hair and tickles her skin, and it is undeniably lovely.

'A husband should never leave his wife to her own devices. The things they do when they're alone, you know.' She can feel him grin.

She smiles and nods. 'Of course.'

'Now, if you had agreed to a fleeting fancy of our marriage,' he starts with a faulty attempt at a faux French accent he had once used on her, 'you may not be here. Pondering. Doing things you women do. Alone.'

She breathes a hum and tightly clutches the compass to her heart.

'So you say. It would have never happened.'

'You and me? Of course it would, love. _I_ am Captain Jack Sparrow. I own a ship, a large ship --

'-- a broken ship.' She corrects.

He grunts with reluctant acknowledgement. 'Would have to thank you for that.'

'All the better, really. We might have been running around forever from that thing.'

And, in her mind, she can see him frown. With a crooked smile on his face.

'Ah, so you should understand why I sacrificed your boy for my safety.' Lazily, he traces the contours of her face with a dirt-stained finger.

'Yes, because you're selfish and immoral and --

'-- a pirate.' His other hand tangles in her hair.

'How can I forget?'

'But you don't.' And then there was nothing.

_Never, never, never at all._

She opens her eyes and breathes deeply. The town is awake now, and there is hint of bustling fishermen walking along the docks. The clock-tower in the distance signals the end of her morning, and she stands up and wrings some water out of her dress, droplets swallowed back by the shallow tide. She spares one more glance at the horizon, then looks down at the compass. Flipping it open, the dial continues to point west.

'Right then,' she murmurs to herself. 'Off we go.'

And to home she returns.

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_15 July 2006  
_ © vexia LJ com.


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